D&D General When Was it Decided Fighters Should Suck at Everything but Combat?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I think the fairly obvious is that nobody decided this explicitly. Rather, it was the byproduct of other decision that had unintended side effects.


This is the big, granddaddy reason. Once you started working with skills, largely starting with adding the thief, someone was gonna be the skill monkey and someone else was gonna not be when the classes had even footing on this before.


When going to the skill system, the rogue had to be loaded with skills to continue to do the thing they could do before - that meant a lot of skill points to spend. Everyone else got a lot less.
Then take a look at what the fighter gained in 3e compared to everyone else. Nobody gains feats like the fighter does. Between level-based and bonus feats, they get a ton more than anyone else - meaning they can develop weapon prowess in more than one weapon, a couple of fighting styles, or maybe a weapon and a bunch of general feats to improve their saves or skills. Having just 2 skill points per level seemed OK - a full BAB and tons of feats would be powerful enough for general class balance.
At least that was the potential that was seen. Then the poop hit the fan.
Feats didn't compete with full casters because they didn't scale with level - they had to be bought to stack up abilities.
Players optimized. They dumped Int so the whole Combat Expertise chain tended to be moot. They may even have LOST skill points from it. Players didn't branch out with general feats, but focused on specific combat trees for more exploits or DPR. Too many feats gave out conditional benefits that depended on the style of campaign. Lots of humanoid opponents optimized to fight with their weapons? Improved Disarm can be good. Few humanoids compared to monstrous opponents? Improved Disarm is useless. And let's not forget that just doing hit point damage is the best tactic of all if you want to actually defeat something...
And I think it's mainly a case of unintended consequences. They didn't realize that the 3e feat structure wasn't gonna work out as expected when they published it.

I think the players I played with never dumped INT. You wanted the Combat Expertise chain, it had some very useful feats to get extra AoOs and get your melee guys a +4 bonus to attack!
But whether you got 3 skill points per level or 1 skill point (or 4 respectively 2 if you're human) per level still isn't going to make you good at anything, considering that even if you wanted to sneak around, you needed 2 ranks per level (actually 4, because Hide and Move Silently isn't a class skill for Fighters), and that didn't mean you noticed where you were sneaking around and you couldn't talk to anyone to save your life, and you'd still be screwed if there were any obstacles in your path.

I'd say 3E really set the expectation that Fighters are low skill characters, and it kinda stuck around. D&D 5e24 at least gives Fighters an ability to buff all their skill checks.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

But part of the reason that project fizzled out is that it was still very much a 5e D&D game I was designing, and after stepping away from 5e for a couple years and having to attempt to slightly relearn everything for 2024 5e I just realized that the whole system has become too bogged down with combat abilities. Most of my favorite D&D memories are non-combat experiences, yet 90% of the rules are combat, most of the mental load of planning or running a game relates to having balanced combats and combat stats familiar and at the ready, and then the actual combats are often on the sloggy side. Now I'm not saying combat shouldn't get a lot of rules support or that it shouldn't be the biggest pillar of play, but at this point it has just gobbled up the whole game entirely.

But does that mean that more rules need to be devoted to the non-combat stuff, or just that combat needs less rules and everything else is fine at the level it is?

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

I say that fighters are pigeon-holed as the "combat machine" or "dumb jock" class rather than "meat shield" but it works out to about the same thing.

I like the idea of fighters being skill-monkeys in addition to their fighting ability, but then I like the idea of skill-monkeys in general. At one extreme, the fighter & thief/rogue classes might be combined, with the classic thief or rogue simply being a fighter build with high Dex, light armor, and finesse weapons.

 

[Tigris]

And then further pushed away when they decided Rogues had to suddenly be good at fighting and damage in 4e (strikers) and continued that idea into 5e.

Why be a Fighter when you can be just as good (with a few less HP) but also have double the ability in some skills and basically get mostly better advantages than the "meat shield"?

Well the decision that everyone should be useful in a fight was a good decision. Just that they forgot to also make everyone useful outside of combat.


4E later added martial practices and fighter with high healing surges were useful for rituals, but thats not enough.


5.24 did cleverly reause these mechanics by allowing a fighter to use second winds for adding 1d10 to a skill roll. Thats similar to what martial practices did. (Using healing surge to get a bonus to skill).

Also with 5.24 as a fighter on level 6 you can now take skilled (and on level 8 take another half feat) so its easier to get more skills. And the newer fighter subclasses give more non combat uses to the fighter. Rune knight being especially good:

On level 3 as a fighter you can have expertise on thieves tools, disguise kit and smithing tools. And always advantage on sleight of hand and deception. If you are dex based you are quite useful outside of combat. And you can also get advantage on athletics when you want it proficiency times per day.

Fighter just has a lot of power in the subclasses and the good ones then help not only with combat. Rogue has a bit more power in the class itself.

 

[soviet]

I think it's worth noting that nearly every person you mentioned up there was a multi or dual classed NPC in D&D. When you have a handful of classes, you can't mirror every archetype. So rather than bloat up every class you do have, you just multi-classed into another class to get the skills represented in fiction.

No they aren't! That's tautological. 'We've made fighter dumb jocks so now all the interesting fighter paragons are suddenly now a complex multi-class chimera'.

 

[soviet]

In Level Up, all of the character classes were given features that covered all three pillars of gameplay- Combat, Social Interaction and Exploration. In addition to features associated with Combat, the Level Up Fighter picked up Steely Mien and Reputation as Social Interaction features.

Easily the best thing about Level Up IMO is the cool non-combat stuff they give to the martial classes

 

[Corinnguard]

Easily the best thing about Level Up IMO is the cool non-combat stuff they give to the martial classes

That and for the martial classes' combat pillar, proficiency in 2-3 combat traditions (the number of which continues to grow).

 

[aco175]

How does all these 'historical' examples and movie examples change when magic is added to the world? Does adding a couple wizards and clerics to the Roman legions change tactics and engineering and defense and everything else? Would that allow the soldiers to focus more on fighting? Hard to argue these kinds of things.

 

[Sacrosanct]

No they aren't! That's tautological. 'We've made fighter dumb jocks so now all the interesting fighter paragons are suddenly now a complex multi-class chimera'.

That’s not what happened. They didn’t suddenly make fighters dumb jocks. Multiclassing to capture fictional archetypes has been there since day one. Just open deities and demigods, or read any of the dragon magazines. Also, I’ll repeat what I said above: most of those traits of fictional heroes are captured by high stats in abilities like INT or CHA, you didn’t need a specific power to do something smart or persuasive. Also, DnD was never built or meant to replicate fictional figures in a game statblock. It can’t. No rpg can do that as fictional characters are all over the board with abilities that don’t carry over into the game well.

I also disagree with your premise that a fighter paragon can’t be interesting unless it’s multiclassed. That’s just simply not true.

 

[Laurefindel]

it was decided that the fighter would suck at everything other than fighting on day 1 of D&D. Then, it was never decided that the fighter would not suck at anything else, mostly because being good at something else was ground for a new class.

« Sucking at things » is baseline in the history of D&D. Everyone sucked at everything, except fighters who didn’t suck at fighting, and the cleric who didn’t suck as much at fighting. To compensate, the magic-user and cleric were given spells, allowing them to be very good at very specific things for a brief moment a certain number of times per day.

Only later (but still early on the grand scale of things I guess) did we get a character that didn’t suck at everything else (but still sucked at fighting) as the thief. Obviously, being good at everything else but fighting would be totally broken, therefore success wasn’t guaranteed. Thus came the « skills ». Also note that « everything else but fighting » mostly comprised of opening locked doors, finding secret passages, spotting and disarming traps, and moving without being heard or seen.

But from this point on, every time the concept of a character being good at something else than fighting was brought up, a new class would be created. So when posters said that the creation of « skills » was the crystallizing point of fighters forever sucking at everything except fighting, I think they’re right.